Televisions and Internet technologies are beginning to converge. For example, the Internet is gaining television like qualities, such as the capability to play videos and music, and to broadcast live video feeds, and televisions are becoming more interactive like the Internet. In particular, access to the World Wide Web (or simply the “web”) via Internet-enabled television systems (e.g., interactive television) is progressing and becoming more popular. Typically, such television systems allow users to access both web content information and television content via a television equipped with a set top box having browser software, although some types of advanced televisions and client terminals have built-in interactive capability, without the need for a separate set top box.
Internet web sites (or web servers) or other content providers often provide dynamic, as opposed to static, content on a web page that is to be rendered for display on a client terminal. An example of dynamic content is a text string that changes on a displayed web page or is rendered, while other content on the web page remain static. This dynamic text string creates an appealing experience to viewers, and is often used for items such as breaking news, weather updates, sports scores, or other content that changes frequently.
Various techniques are available to provide dynamic content on a web page. The dynamic content may be provided by way of a feed or an entry tool. Code written in a scripting language (such as Java Script™) can be included with the hypertext markup language (HTML) code of a web page or called as a function. For instance, an applet is a program that can be attached to an HTML document in order to write dynamic content.
When a traditional computer, such as a personal computer (PC), is used to access the Internet and to display dynamic web page content, the length of dynamically written text is not of great concern. This is because most browser user interfaces (UIs) provide scrolling controls, typically in the form of “scroll bars.” Therefore, if the length of the dynamic text string is larger than what can be accommodated at one time in the UI display area of the PC, the scroll bars can be used to view portions of the text string that are otherwise obscured.
In some instances, back-end preview tools are used so as to reduce or eliminate the need for scroll bars at the client terminal. Such preview tools are used to manage content by making sure that text is composed to fit inside a predetermined area, and often involves human editorial contact with the text output before the text “goes live” on the Internet (e.g., the text pages are previewed every time content is to be updated and then placed on a web server for subsequent access by browsers). This is time-consuming and inefficient.
Interactive television systems typically do not have the benefit of scroll bars of PCs. Instead, dynamic text strings often need to be broken (e.g., truncated or split) so as to fit the display area of a television. FIGS. 1–2 illustrate this truncation in greater detail for a sample dynamic text string 100. It should be noted here that while the text string 100 is shown in FIG. 1 as being broken into 3 separate lines of text, the text string 100 is, in general, a continuous unbroken string (unless, of course, hard carriage returns comprise part of the text string)—the breaks in the text string 100 in FIG. 1 are only for purposes of allowing the text string 100 to fit within the margins of that page in this patent application.
FIG. 2 shows a portion of the text string 100 rendered on a television 200. Because the entire length of the text string 100 cannot fit within the confines of a display area 202 of the television 200, the text string 100 is truncated after the letter S in “STRING,” and an ellipsis 204 is appended at that location. If the viewer wishes to see the next portion of the text string 100 that fits within the display area 202, then the viewer can click on a MORE button 206. A feature to use the MORE button 206 to move to the next page to view additional portions (e.g., substrings) of the text string 100 is sometimes referred to as a “page flipper.”
As can be seen in FIG. 2, truncation of the word “STRING” results in an unpleasant viewer experience since viewers prefer to see entire words rather than portions of words, so that they do not have to guess what the word is. Moreover, current truncation techniques often do not have the ability to determine how much text can fit lengthwise in a row/line in the display area 202. To address this problem, character counts have been tried, where a character count is fixed based on a conservative estimate of how many characters can fit on one line of the display area 202. Then, the text string is broken when the character count is reached on each line of the display area 202. Thus, a conservative estimate would be based on a situation where all of the characters to be displayed in a single line of the display area 202 comprise characters having wide pixel widths (such as the letter “m” versus the letter “i”).
The problem with such character count techniques is that they are not consistent. Using a fixed character count based on a conservative estimate cannot take into account the vast difference in pixel widths between the various characters in a typical text string. As a result, the character count causes large tracts of empty space (or “real estate”) on the display area 202 that could have been used for additional characters from the text string. The large tracts of empty space are also visually unappealing to a viewer and looks like a “bug.” And of course, character count techniques and other current truncation techniques cannot ensure that the truncation would occur at a visually pleasant and convenient “space” in a text string.
Therefore, improvements are needed in techniques to display information in an interactive television environment.